


Mad Scientists

by kalliopeia



Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-17 05:01:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8131372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalliopeia/pseuds/kalliopeia
Summary: First and foremost, Charlotte is a scientist. Some days, she is also a mother. Being a scientist is easier.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: mentions/themes of human & animal experimentation, brief mentions of racism & sexism, very brief implications of past abuse, brief violence, some Barn-related coercion
> 
> Note: I am aware of the existence of a Mara backstory comic that was published with one of the DVDs. I have not seen this comic. If this fic is compliant with the canon established in said comic, it is only because I am clearly a wizard. That said, I think it’s compliant or at least compliant-ish with the televised canon. (If the comic’s online somewhere, someone should hit me up with a link.) I have also not watched the Haven Origins videos, mostly because I’ve heard they’re not worth it, so same there.
> 
> Note 2: This was gonna be a short Charlotte character study, but I am not a concise writer and shit happened. If you want to look out for it, you can totally see the narration spiral out of my control.

First and foremost, Charlotte is a scientist.

She’s brilliant and clever and driven to success. They call her ambitious, which she never really considers the right word- she has known ambition, people whose drive to accomplish magnificent things comes solely from wanting to see magnificent things be accomplished, by people who just want to know if they can. Charlotte wants to succeed, wants to be seen, and wants to fix problems, but she has no interest in doing the impossible just to prove she can.

Dr. Adam Cross, though, he is ambitious.

She’s young when she meets him, barely eighty, and she is annoyed by the reverence with which others speak his name. Charlotte isn’t interested in his reputation, but she’s happy to have his brain on the team. He’s respectful, happy to listen to all the members of the team even if he’s far beyond them, and he’s brilliant. He takes an interest in her work, in her notebooks. Men have been complimenting Charlotte’s looks since before she was old enough to hear it, and even now, she’s never wanted it, always brushed it off in pursuit of something more. Adam, though, Adam calls her brilliant a dozen times before he calls her beautiful, and by the time he does, she’s impatient to hear it.

Their courtship is slow and patient. He calls her doctor as often as he calls her blossom, her favorite pet name. They spend more nights poring over journals and papers, rechecking each other’s mathematics, and sharing developments than they do seeking popular entertainment. Adam pushes Charlotte’s work on memory in directions she never would have thought of and Charlotte helps run the statistics in Adam’s papers about aether applications to impact behavior in mice. She falls in love with him, or maybe doesn’t. Maybe it’s just safe and sensible and practical.

She waits until after she crosses her first century to marry him. She doesn’t want people talking, after all, and Adam’s nearly eight hundred already, though of course they appear to be within a year of each other’s aging, were things taking the natural course. There are still whispers, people who say that she’s sleeping her way to the top or trying to marry into the upper echelons of scholarly discourse rather than earning it herself, but she tries to ignore them. Adam’s better about it than she is. He genuinely doesn’t care what they think.

With the sort of research Adam does, he can’t care about the whispers about him. He’s one of the few scientists willing to do research about the possible benefits of aether application since the plague.  Only in mice, of course, and under extremely careful circumstances, but nonetheless, he draws a lot of critique. Other than age suspension, no one wants aether near them. None of the respectable scientists will go near aether, these days.

The plague ended about thirty years before Charlotte was born, so she’s only ever known the story and the after-effects. Over the course of a few decades, people began getting sick and dying inexplicably, developing strange abilities and disabilities, and going black at the eyes. Finally, it was discovered that a small percentage of the machines dispensing aether to suspend aging were calibrated incorrectly, dispensing almost twelve times as much aether as is the industry standard. Almost a billion people were impacted to a greater or lesser degree. Scientists leaped on attempting to find out how to fix the situation, reverse the impact of aether. Adam worked in that task force, researching the impacts of the accidental aether exposure. The first three attempted cures killed those impacted. After that, people were just told to live with the effects of the accident. Several scientists found that the impacts of aether carry on generationally, with no obvious signs of dilution, so the people impacted are carefully monitored.

Those already infected could not be cured, but a prevention was discovered and every citizen of Solis was treated. Other than with carefully calibrated and highly complex machines such as used for anti-aging, the government assures them, they are immune to the impacts of aether. There will never be a plague again. A great deal of Adam’s research casts doubt on the claim, which is yet another source of pushback in his work.

Although aether research is complex and fascinating, and she loves reading Adam’s papers, Charlotte would never research it herself. She doesn’t have the time or energy to deal with protesters. Adam doesn’t care, is more annoyed by the tight government restrictions than anything. There’s power in aether, potential, and he wants to know it- wants to map the upper limits of what it can do- but no one will let him. He tries to content himself with the studies on his mice, justifying his research with trite speeches about knowledge and potential. Charlotte pities him, all his brilliance and passion pulled in by a field everyone else is terrified of.

They pass centuries like this, and it’s quiet. Later, Charlotte will be asked what it was like, being married to a _man like that_. She’ll never know how to answer. It is unremarkable. It is typical. She cannot imagine living any other way. Of course there are signs, but her marriage is only a marriage then.

When they have been married for their first three centuries, they begin talking intermittently about children. Around the turn of the fourth, they carefully put plans in place and Charlotte gets pregnant. They have a baby daughter, who Charlotte names Mara after her own mother. Charlotte finds herself doubting her ability to parent- staring down at a tiny infant she has no idea how to connect with, she just wants to go back to her research, something that fascinates her and that she understands. Adam has no such problem. Adam dotes on their daughter, adores her, plays silly games and calls her nicknames and gives Charlotte chest pains by tossing her in the air and catching her.

She’s less than a year old when she starts getting sick. It’s common, now- there’s some speculation that it’s the result of genetic changes caused by aether, but Charlotte has always dismissed this as a conspiracy theory, instead blaming the heavily polluted air in the cities. Charlotte takes her to a doctor, and then another, and then a third. All of them take scans and readings and measures of her baby daughter, and then go ashen when they read them over. Charlotte does her own examination. It’s bad.

Charlotte isn’t good at any of it. She doesn’t know how to comfort her daughter when she wakes up in the night, feverish and screaming. She doesn’t know how to ease Mara’s pain. She doesn’t know how to cure her. She can’t distract herself, she can’t support Adam- she spends the next few years wringing her hands and suffering, watching her daughter slowly die. Adam is the parent she wishes she could be, then, as much as she’ll never admit it later. He rocks his shaking daughter back to sleep, calls her Dove, makes her feel safe. And he researches.

It goes on for four years. Sometimes Mara recovers and sometimes she gets worse. Adam keeps skipping his age suspension appointments and ages dramatically, what appears to be a couple of decades. Their marriage stalls, as Mara takes up every moment of their time. Charlotte is exhausted all the time. They barely speak to each other.

Mara’s five the night that Adam walks into the room where Charlotte’s washing dishes numbly.

“I can cure her,” Adam says quietly.

Charlotte drops the dish, barely noticing when it cracks. “What?” she asks. “How?”

Adam hesitates. “It’s better you don’t know.”

“Tell me,” Charlotte demands.

“Aether,” he says slowly. “I’ve recreated her condition in lab rats, and I can use aether to reverse it.”

Charlotte stills. Aether’s volatile, dangerous, but powerful. She’s read enough of Adam’s studies over the years to know it could theoretically be used as a medicine, as well as just about anything else. It may have side effects, but she’s dying. Charlotte’s daughter is dying, and the depoliticized medicine that everyone accepts cannot save her. They have nothing to lose.

“Lab rats?” she asks, the only detail she can really grasp. “You’re betting our daughter’s life on lab rats?”

“I know,” Adam says, and he pulls her into his arms for the first time in months. She sinks against him. “I know, blossom. I can’t be completely certain, but I think I can do it.”

“Her test results are bad right now,” Charlotte murmurs. “If we do nothing…”

Adam shakes against her, a single sob. “Please let me try,” he whispers into her hair.

Charlotte steels herself. She’s a scientist. She pulls back. “Let me see your data,” she demands.

He shows her. It’s all extremely illegal, which she ignores for the better goal of double- and triple-checking his math. It’s incredible. It would be an enormous medical breakthrough, if people cared more about dying children than substances they’ve decided to call unacceptably dangerous.

“You’ll need an enormous amount of aether,” Charlotte points out, walking into Mara’s room, where Adam is singing a lullaby while cradling her to his chest. “More than you can obtain through a fraudulent study. Probably more than you can obtain on the black market.”

Adam nods. “I’m looking, but…”

“I can get it,” Charlotte says. Years later, she will lie about this moment. She will try to pretend it didn’t happen this way. “I know someone who does research in age-suspension facilities. I can get it.”

Adam hesitates for a long moment. Mara cries softly, exhaustedly, into his chest. “Okay. Make your plans.”

So she does. She makes preparations, steels her shoulders, grabs a clipboard, walks into the facility like she owns it, and walks out with enough aether to get her imprisoned for the next two centuries. When she shows it to Adam, he looks at her like she’s just moved a mountain.

He brings his lab equipment home and they hook Mara to it carefully, joining it to her medical equipment. There are needles that go into her limbs, pads that attach to her scalp and body, tubes every which way- enough to obscure their child. If this fails and she dies, they won’t even be able to hold her.

Adam measures the aether carefully, making sure to get the exact amount that they’ve calculated. This is the first human trial for using aether like this, so it’s impossible to know exactly how much to use, but they’re exact anyway. They are scientists.

It is an enormous amount of aether. Adam has not had this much aether in him, total, and he has received age suspension treatments for nearly the past twelve hundred years.

“Will is important,” Adam says, as if she doesn’t know. “Hold my hand. We have to focus on healing her.”

Charlotte slips her hand into his and stares down at their beautiful child. “Mara,” she whispers. “Live. Please live.”

“My dove,” Adam says, and pushes the plunger.

Mara immediately quiets and they stare at the monitors, clutching each other silently. She is alive, her vitals are strong. A few minutes later, Charlotte quietly points out that her brain waves have not been this healthy for months. Adam cries silently when she kicks out, giggling like a healthy child her age. They have to repeatedly stop her from yanking on the tubes and wires all around her. The doctors never would have believed she could be this strong. After an hour, they unhook her from the machines and Adam picks her up, cradling her against him. She reaches out and tries to pull Charlotte’s hair.

When Adam tries to set her down, Mara protests with a loud, “No!” It’s been months since she’s been healthy enough to speak. It’s then that Charlotte’s veneer as a scientist cracks. She puts her hands on her face and cries.

The family quietly moves soon after. They have no choice- the aether theft is gaining a huge amount of media attention, and with Adam’s research, it’s only a matter of time before someone notices Mara’s miraculous recovery and figures it out. They move cities away, to an entirely different region of Solis, and make their home. Both of them get jobs at a local institute specializing in memory. Adam joins a team looking at removing small periods of episodic memory from a person- he jokes that it’s the least controversial job he’s ever had- and Charlotte begins studying memory implantation.

The town is unfamiliar and lonely, and Adam’s increasingly bored with research that doesn’t have world-changing implications, but they have their daughter. A year after their crime, she’s as healthy as any other girl her age, and twice as sharp.

A year after that, and Adam’s somehow procured some aether to experiment with at home. Charlotte’s afraid when she finds out, afraid of what he might bring down on their family, but it’s not like she didn’t see the signs. This is who he is. If he were anyone else, she would be the mother of a dead daughter. So she just makes sure he didn’t leave a paper trail and tells him not to leave careless black smudges around their house.

One day, she walks into her husband’s office to find her seven-year-old daughter levitating a flake of aether and giggling.

“Mama, look!” Mara says, pointing at the aether. “I can make it move!”

“Oh, no, Mara,” Charlotte says, scooping up her protesting child and carrying her out of the room, making a note to go back and secure the aether as soon as she can. “That’s very dangerous. It could hurt you!”

Mara, age seven, is already more stubborn and single-minded than either of her parents and most of the other adults Charlotte’s known. She is almost completely fearless, and ‘dangerous’ is a word with almost no meaning to her. In many ways, she has no conception of harm, certainly not of death, and it terrifies Charlotte and comforts her. Mara is so very, very alive. She breaks into her father’s study again and again, wanting to play with the volatile substance she considers a new toy.

It doesn’t help that Adam is more fascinated than concerned by this behavior. “She has better control of aether than most of the interns,” he tells Charlotte, voice full of awe. “It took me three centuries to build up that level of affinity. Blossom, she’s incredible. It’s not dangerous, not to her. Not with as much connection as she has.”

Mara’s far too quick for her own good, and quickly picks up on her father’s curiosity about her and the aether. It’s not long before she convinces him to let her play with some more, just to see what she can do. When Charlotte walks in, she’s shifting it from a butterfly to a hummingbird, grinning ear to ear.

Charlotte drags her husband out of the room and demands to know what he’s thinking. They argue in furious, hushed tones in the hall while Mara changes the shape of the aether flitting around her head.  Adam makes a few arguments: firstly, that Mara has total control over the aether, that damage from aether comes from accidents, from neglect and ignorance, and that she’s powerful enough to remain entirely safe; secondly, that this only happened because of Mara’s cure, that this is just the side-effect, and it’s far too late for Charlotte to back down now; and thirdly, that Mara’s natural affinity is completely unheard of, that no one on Solis has ever done anything like it, and if they allow her to grow her skills, she will be a walking revolution.

Charlotte is afraid, but Adam isn’t and Mara probably doesn’t know the meaning of the term, and Charlotte inevitably loses the argument. It terrifies her, to see her daughter playing with the most destructive substance on any world as if it were one of the childish science experiment kits Charlotte had enjoyed as a child. Still, she sees what Adam sees, even if she hasn’t spent her entire life pushing for it like he has. She has so much power over aether, and aether has so much power over everything- in a few years, there will be almost nothing she won’t be able to do, given proper supplies.

A great deal of Mara’s childhood passes this way, gaining greater and greater control over aether and her parents arguing about whether she should be allowed to. Mara reads their old studies as soon as she gains the comprehension to understand them, but she has a particular interest in Adam’s old work on the potential uses of aether. The more controversial the study, the more Mara pores over it, fascinated by what could be done. By what she could do. By now she knows what she is, knows that she has abilities no one else on Solis could even conceptualize. Her father’s studies detail what aether could hypothetically do, one after the other: unnatural occurrences and abilities, personality alteration, perceptual alteration, healing, alteration of time and space, bodily changes, control. She sits on her father’s knee and asks him question after question about his research, about what aether might do. Adam’s response is that, after approximately eleven hundred years of research on the topic, he has not conclusively proven that there is anything aether cannot do, given the proper research and training to learn how to apply it. Charlotte does what she can to encourage Mara’s few other interests, mostly painting and playing instruments. None of it catches her the way aether does.

Mara is ten the first time Charlotte catches her putting aether into the body of another animal- a neighboring cat, which gains the ability to levitate, much to Mara’s delight. The blood runs out of Charlotte’s face and she orders Mara to undo it, only for Mara to shrug and explain that she can’t- but why would she, given that cats are obviously much better like this? Charlotte pulls her daughter home, trying to play the disciplinarian, failing because neither her daughter nor her husband have any interest in restraint. Of course it keeps escalating. The only thing Charlotte can do is quietly change her mind about buying Mara a puppy for her next birthday.

Mara is fourteen when Charlotte finds out that she’s been toying with aether and a boy from school, a class clown who’s loud and unyielding in the presence of anyone but Mara, who he patently adores. Charlotte tries not to wonder if he’s been given a choice. When she tells Adam, he shoos the boy out of the house and tells him not to come back. Mara sulks and insists she wasn’t doing anything to him, just teaching him how to use the aether too. When Adam asks about it, she tells him that he isn’t as good at it as she is. “Not at the good stuff, anyway. He healed a bird.” Charlotte tells herself that she doesn’t shiver.

For every incident, there is her husband in bed that night, nearly shaking with glee. “Do you _see_ her, blossom?” he asks. “She is going to change the world. Aether research is so young, so stifled, and she’s already proving things it took me centuries just to hypothesize. If I’m right about the nature of aether, there may be very little she won’t be able to do, provided she develops the aptitude for it.” It may be true, of course, there is so much potential in her daughter, so much power. Charlotte tries to have faith that their child will be wise enough to handle such power, she tries to believe the best of her offspring. Still, whenever she spots Mara with black stained hands, her first reaction is fear.

A few months after Charlotte found out about William, she finds out that he’s still hanging around her daughter most days, and she remembers that there are dangers in this world besides aether. So, she sits her teenage daughter down and goes through the sex talk. Mara is thoroughly unimpressed with the mechanics, and Charlotte is sharply reminded of herself at the same age. When Charlotte explains that William might have thoughts she doesn’t, Mara looks a bit uncomfortable, but just shrugs and says, “It doesn’t matter what he thinks. I’m in charge.” Charlotte has completely lost sight of normality and cannot tell if this is a healthy attitude or not. She doesn’t share the comment with her husband.  

Shortly after, Mara grows silent and sulky, and it’s so typical of a teenager that Charlotte is relieved. William’s still around, at least at times, and there’s some petty drama between them as Mara gets older and the hormones get worse. Charlotte chuckles, remembers herself at that age, and tells herself that all of this is normal. Mara intermittently hates and needs William, loathes the other girls in her class and thinks she’s more interesting and deep than all of them, wears too much eye makeup, and doesn’t think her parents could possibly understand. It is, according to Charlotte’s friends and every teenage parenting book she’s read, astoundingly normal.

Charlotte is relaxed in her role as a mother for the first time in years, making half-hearted motions to connect to Mara, knowing they won’t succeed but hoping the effort will help their relationship later. Adam, conversely, is floundering as a parent for the first time. Other than aether, they have nothing in common, and he’s not interested in trying to meet Mara on her terms. Bringing up aether results in huffing, eye-rolling and storming off just as much as it results in any sort of connection between them. Charlotte is a bit relieved every time Mara rebuffs her father’s enthusiastic inquiries about her skills and experiments with aether. Adam, who in some ways resembles a sulking teenager himself, spends a lot of his energy attempting to engage with his daughter and very little communicating with his wife. Charlotte finds that she doesn’t mind. It’s almost a victory.

Mara grows up and, gradually, it gets worse again. Mara’s teenage dislike of other people is replaced with genuine adult apathy. She begins to overcome her hatred of being ‘told what to do’ in regards to her father and aether. She stops fitting so neatly into the ‘angsty teenager’ category and Charlotte ceases to understand her. Before Charlotte can form a plan of action, their tiny filament of a relationship is gone again.

A few months before Mara turns eighteen, Adam tells Charlotte that they’ve been talking about his old experiments again. He’s excited, and Charlotte is immediately nauseous. She wishes she’d never married this man. Divorce is highly common, of course, and Adam and Charlotte have already exceeded the average marriage length several times over. One drawback to near-immortality is that people change, and relationships almost never hold together for a lifetime. Charlotte wonders if this is it, if Adam has just changed so much from when she met him- but he hasn’t, and she doesn’t think she has either, and that might be the worst part. Charlotte’s a smart woman, she’s always been a smart woman- why did it take her this long to know better?

Mara’s eighteen- old enough to get the plague prevention treatment start getting small-dose age suspension, a rite of passage in Solis- and Charlotte has less control of her than ever. Every few days, it seems, she walks in on Adam and Mara enthusiastically discussing aether application- usually theoretical applications, the possibility of using aether to achieve various ends. When they’re talking about this, Charlotte might as well not exist- she can walk into the room, glare, try to distract them, and then watch the conversation continue unabated. Other days, she walks in to abrupt silence and conspiratorial glances between her husband and daughter.

Charlotte is a scientist, and there’s plenty of evidence that it’s bad. Too many black smudges on her house, on her daughter’s hands and clothes. Too many of her husband’s most controversial studies splayed across the table, alterations, corrections, and notes jotted in her daughter’s handwriting. Too many nights where she can hear her daughter sneak in or out, late- accompanied by William some nights, alone others. Too many delighted grins on her husband’s face when he notices the same things she does. But she’s powerless to do anything about it except observe and fret, and she’s been doing that Mara’s entire life. She’s exhausted. She tries to stop noticing, tries to turn away and bury her mind in blind faith that her daughter will be all right, and struggles to manage it. She buries herself in work, wraps her mind around a different puzzle until she can barely remember what month it is, never mind the mysteries in her home.

Mara is twenty and she and Charlotte barely exchange more than small talk anymore. Charlotte is a failure of a mother, has always been, and has neither the ability nor the energy to try to start again. She barely speaks to her husband, either, but this is more intentional. She has nothing to say to him. There is nothing he might say to her that she desires to hear. The only thing they ever talk about is Mara. Adam expounds upon her gifts and her abilities, and Charlotte turns away.

“How is Mara?” she asks one night, breaking the heavy silence of their bedroom, because her daughter’s barely looked her in the eye in three weeks and she needs an update.

Adam rolls over and beams at her. “Oh, blossom,” he says. The nickname feels foreign, now. “She’s brilliant. Her control of aether is unparalleled. No one in history has had the skill with it she does.”

Charlotte ignores it, feeling the same dull resentment as always flow over her. “Is she happy?”

“Hm? Oh, definitely,” Adam says. “She’s done some amazing things with lab rats. It’s a shame about the plague prevention treatments- human experimentation is nearly impossible now…”

A chill runs through Charlotte and she turns away, blinking tears out of her eyes. Adam continues rambling on about Mara and aether and what she can do, what she could do theoretically if only she were allowed, absentmindedly stroking her arm. Charlotte hates him, she realizes. She’s never thought that she could experience hatred, always thought of it as too strong of an emotion for her calculating, rational mind, but she does. He did this to her, to her marriage, her family, her life. Charlotte hates it all and he’s to blame.

Charlotte doesn’t speak to him for weeks, but doubts that he notices. She considers getting a divorce- they’ve already been married for more than twelve times the average on Solis, so it would raise a few eyebrows and some invasive questions, but she can handle that. Mara, though- only the fact that she lives in the same house as Adam gives her any contact with her daughter at all. If they separate, Adam will get Mara. Charlotte briefly considers divorcing him anyway, taking the risk, trying to build up a relationship with Mara on her own terms, but every time she imagines that path, it ends with stiltedness and failure. It’s too much of a risk. Charlotte is not a risk-taker. She writes pros and cons, calculates her odds, and makes no moves.

Mara is twenty-two and Charlotte is telling herself that she is not involved in the recent aether thefts. Adam knows nothing about it, much to his frustration and Charlotte’s relief. Mara’s almost never around- she spends most of her time with William, now, and only occasionally comes back to the house to sleep. Charlotte tries to contact her, occasionally, but with little success. Some days, Mara looks almost euphoric, drifting around untethered to anything specific. Others, she shambles into the house at any hour looking like a corpse. It’s enough to make Charlotte wonder if her daughter has developed a drug habit. She suspects, of course, that it’s nothing so mundane.

One day, after another calm, careless comment of Adam’s sends Charlotte into a resentful, bitter state, she goes to Mara’s room with the intent of finding Adam’s old studies and notes and burning them. Piled atop all Adam’s old papers are several newer ones, in Mara’s handwriting, with equations much like his but much more specific hypotheses. A few have notes- or worse, what appear to be results sections- in shaky, erratic handwriting and black smudges in the margins. Charlotte shuffles the papers back into what she hopes was their original position, leaves Mara’s room, closes the door, and cries in the hall, one fist pressed to her mouth to muffle the sounds. She does not burn the papers. Burning aether is unsafe. There are very few ways to destroy it safely, in a way that Mara could not easily fix it, and Charlotte doesn’t have the access. There’s nothing she can do but wipe the tears off her face and hope for the best. She does not venture into Mara’s room after that.

Less than a year later, Charlotte is the only one home when she opens the door to two law enforcers. They walk into her home, sit down at her table, and spread photos across it.

At first, Charlotte doesn’t understand what she’s seeing. “What is this?” she asks, gesturing at the images. Each page is split in two, with one side showing an animal and the other some odd chaos. There are roughly a dozen images, all together.

“Aether damage,” one of the law enforcers tells her. “Reminiscent of the plague, but with a much higher level of control. Besides which… well, no one’s putting rabbits through age suspension. This is no accident.”

“The effects of these have been short-lived, but dangerous,” the other law enforcer tells her. Charlotte sits numbly as they go through the events suspected to be consequences of what was done to the animals. Charlotte suspects that emotion was used as a trigger- she’s been hearing about the possibility for centuries now. In animals, it wouldn’t be that effective, comparatively, but effective enough. Certainly effective enough for this. Charlotte presses a hand to her mouth.

“There’s more,” one of the law enforcers tells her, and adds three new pictures to the pile. They depict babies. Of course, Charlotte thinks distantly- small children are too young to have received plague prevention treatments. It’s why they were able to use aether to save Mara as a child in the first place. If she’d already been treated, it would have had no impact. The only way to use human subjects, in a world like Solis where people are treated to become immune to the impacts of aether, is to use children. It makes sense. Why babies, Charlotte doesn’t know- children do not receive the prevention treatment until their late teens, so children of any age would do. Perhaps their simple emotions just easier to control. In human subjects, the usage of human factors to harness or trigger the raw power of aether would be much stronger. Of course, then, of course Mara would do this. Charlotte has no doubt that her daughter plans on working up, more and more complex and powerful triggers.

“We’re unable to correct the damage,” one of the law enforcers tells her, “but as of yet, the effects on the children are survivable.” Charlotte stares at the images before her. She doesn’t know what Mara did to them. She doesn’t want to know.

“Dr. Cross,” the law enforcer says gently, “we know about your husband’s research.”

She looks up sharply, eyebrows creased. It takes a moment before she understands. To them, Mara is little more than a child herself, barely more than a footnote in their investigation. Dr. Adam Cross, though, he is a man with centuries of controversial aether research to his name and a stack of ethics complaints and protests to go along with it. He is a man who has spent most of his professional career pushing for more widespread use of aether. Of course he’s the obvious suspect. Charlotte sinks back into her chair with what feels like relief.

“Please help us. We just want to make sure nothing like this happens again,” the law enforcer says gently. “If you’ll submit a statement, testify…”

The other law enforcer interrupts him. “Dr. Cross, do you believe that your husband is responsible for these atrocities?”

Later, her answer to this question will be called a lie. Certainly Mara will call it such, and will never forgive her. But when she answers, she answers honestly, answers with all the blame and resentment and bitterness and coldness she has built up in her. Finally, finally, Charlotte says what she means.

“Yes. He is to blame for this.”

The law enforcer nods, averting eye contact out of deference. “Thank you, Dr. Cross. You understand, we will be bringing him into the system shortly. You will be notified when it is time for him to be presented to the court authority. Will you be willing to speak?”

“Yes,” Charlotte says. Her hands are tight on the table. There is no breath in her body. She can do this. She will do this. Finally, after years of silence, she will speak about what Adam has done to her family. And she will save her daughter’s life. She will keep Mara safe.

She resolutely commits herself to this new plan and does not look at the photos again.

The law enforcers take their things and go. Charlotte sits at the table, perfectly still, waiting. Adam does not come home. She knows that the law enforcers have found him, have already taken him in. She waits calmly. She considers trying to contact Mara, or William, but knows from experience that it’s pointless.

It’s nearly nightfall when the door opens and Mara comes in, clothes mussed and hair a wreck. She smells like sex. Charlotte no longer cares about that. Mara is way too far gone to bother caring about ordinary dangers.

“Sit,” she instructs.

Mara raises an eyebrow but does so, slinging herself down at the table. “What’s this about, Mother?”

“You’ve been using aether on animals. A few children,” Charlotte says.

Mara goes still. “Nothing too dangerous,” she says defensively. “Just to see if I can.”

“You can,” Charlotte confirms coldly. “And you got caught. Law enforcers were in the house today.”

Mara looks up sharply, but she just looks sharp, angry. She’s still not afraid. Somehow, it’s infuriating, and Charlotte has to push down annoyance.

“I’ve taken care of it. They don’t believe it was you. For now, anyway. You can never do this again,” Charlotte says. Mara doesn’t relax at all, just sits, wound tight, waiting. Charlotte lets the silence hang for a long moment and then says, calmly, “They believe it was your father.”

Mara leaps up from the table, suddenly frantic. “Wha- but- It wasn’t him! Mother, you have to believe me, it wasn’t him! He didn’t know about it- didn’t know anything about it! Not the experiments- he didn’t even get the aether for me! He wasn’t involved!”

Of course he was involved, Charlotte thinks, but doesn’t say. Instead, she just says sharply, “Sit down, Mara.” Mara glares, but sits. Something in her pose still looks downright threatening, like a predatory animal waiting to pounce. Charlotte isn’t cowed. “I understand that you’re upset.”

“He didn’t do it!” Mara insists, and though Charlotte disagrees, it’s not the matter at hand.

“With his research, his history, they believe he did,” Charlotte says. “There’s no way to prove he didn’t without implicating you.”

“So we’ll implicate me,” Mara growls. “I’ll confess. I’ll _prove_ I can do it.” Charlotte sighs, caught off guard but unsurprised. Mara has no fear, no restraint. If she wants the truth heard, she’ll barrel right ahead, self-assured and confident and not even considering another path.

“You won’t, not if you value your life,” Charlotte says. “They will do whatever they can to contain your power. Everything will change for you if you do this.”

Mara blinks, obviously not having considered this, before squaring her shoulders and scowling at Charlotte. “I don’t care. Whatever it is you think they’ll do to me, I’m not letting them do that to Father. He didn’t do this. He didn’t know.”

“What will you tell them?” Charlotte snaps. “No one in Solis can do what you do, and you’re barely more than a child. What will you tell them when they ask why you’re like this?”

Mara freezes, calculating, clearly not getting anywhere.

“They would find the truth. Your father would not be any better off, and it would ruin you too. The only thing you would be doing is destroying yourself. The truth doesn’t matter, Mara. It’s done.”

“No,” Mara says abruptly, standing. “How can you allow this? He’s your husband!”

“You’re my daughter. If I must pick between you or him, I will choose you,” Charlotte says firmly.

Mara does not hear her, and the conversation devolves into Mara shouting and, eventually, storming off to find William. Charlotte lets her yell, lets her go, and then visits the law enforcers to play the role of sweet, overprotective mother and have Mara banned from all of Adam’s justice proceedings. Mara is so young, only twenty-three, still a child, she says. The employee smiles sympathetically and coos over how hard it can be at that age and completes the order.

The justice system of Solis runs smoothly, particularly in cases like this where the matter is kept quiet so as not to cause public panic. Adam is brought before a committee, as are Charlotte, the parents of the children afflicted and public officials who studied the case. The public officials address the committee first, then the parents, and then Charlotte.

They attach specialized sensors to her skin, intended to measure lying. It doesn’t matter. Charlotte tells only the truth. Her husband has always been obsessed with aether. He believes that power, that finding the outer limits of the possible, is more important than ethical considerations. She knows that he has done illegal experimentation with aether in the past. She believes him to be to blame for this series of crimes as well.

Adam is in the room when she testifies, prevented from speaking. At first, she doesn’t look at him at all. At some point, it occurs to her that the committee might believe she’s avoiding him- might draw conclusions about him, about her. After that she does look over at him occasionally, her expression cool. His eyes are wide. He did not believe her capable of this. Charlotte hates him. Down to her bones, she hates him.

The committee votes and unanimously declares him guilty, but debate on the appropriate punishment for such a criminal. The death penalty has not been practiced in Solis for many millennia- no one in the room was alive during the last execution- but surely they cannot allow someone with this power, this evil, to go free. When a consensus is reached, a shudder runs through Charlotte before she straightens up, grits her teeth, and reminds herself that at least it isn’t her daughter. Her husband will be exiled.

When she gets home, Mara has already heard, and is in a hysterical rage over the news. Charlotte lets the hurricane blow over her home, does not let it bother her. She’s certain that Mara has plans to prevent Adam’s fate. She’s also certain that Mara’s schemes will fail. For once, it is out of her daughter’s hands. Finally, she does not have the power. Charlotte’s decision has been set in stone, now.

Charlotte goes to the appointment when the date comes, to watch. She does not bring Mara, but does allow her to watch remotely. They take Adam’s ring from him and give him a small bag of supplies. A thinny is opened (such a pedestrian word, Charlotte thinks distantly, but she’s never been able to shake the habit and use the scientific terminology for that one). Dr. Adam Cross is banished to the Void, never to return. The ring is given to Charlotte.

Charlotte does not see her daughter for three months. She enters a new research team. She ducks patronizingly sympathetic comments about how her family turned out. She ignores the gossip. She waits. Eventually Mara returns. She’s angrier than before. She doesn’t lash out- she seethes and waits. The only time she calms is with William. Charlotte finds herself grateful for his presence.

A public official comes to her house one day, hat in his hands and a judgmental look in his eyes, to tell them that Adam is dead. There is a new monster in the Void, a creation of its darkness- the Croatoan, it is called. The trackers on Adam went blank shortly after the first reports of this beast. Charlotte thanks him for his time and escorts him out, ignoring Mara’s anguished screams in the background. She thinks about Adam, dying alone and terrified in a place as inhumane as the Void. She cannot decide whether she grieves.

Mara does not get angrier, precisely, but she becomes more deeply angry. Now she’s cold, measured, calculated. She’s got sharp edges and knows how to wield them. She hates Charlotte in the exact same icily calm way that Charlotte hated Adam. There is nothing to be done about it now. She is safe. Charlotte repeats it like a mantra. Mara is safe. That’s all that matters.

A year passes. Mara is rarely at the house, and when she is, she’s all dangerous smiles and sharp verbal barbs. A few times, Charlotte finds her notes and looks through them. It’s enough to reveal that Mara wants vengeance- on Charlotte, and on the people of Solis- for what they did to her father. The notes are all on possible aether applications on people who’ve received plague prevention treatments. Every angle hits a dead end. It’s impossible.

Mara and Adam were always close, and grief is complex. Charlotte quietly puts Mara’s notes away. Charlotte knows she can’t speak to her daughter about mourning, not after what she’s done, but she tries to hire mental scientists to talk to her about it. None of it works. Mara wants nothing to do with healing.

One day, Charlotte comes home to find Mara’s essentials packed and gone, along with Adam’s ring. She calls William’s parents to find them distraught, having discovered the same. She runs a check. Mara and William went through a thinny that morning. They’ve left Solis.

Charlotte grieves, buries herself in work, and lets her daughter go. She comes home to an empty house and tries not to feel like a failure.

Years pass without a word. Slowly, she puts Mara’s things in boxes. Outside, there are very few ways to track Mara’s location, but she does know that her daughter is still alive. Mara is safe, Charlotte reminds herself several times a day. She is safe.

Mara is twenty-six and a man comes to Charlotte’s house. He is tall, dark skinned, with a bald head and a carefully maintained goatee. He invites himself in, sits at her table, and introduces himself as Joel Kern. He is, he explains, under contract with the government office that monitors activity on other worlds.

“There is a world relatively parallel to our own, though we are significantly more advanced than they,” Kern tells her, “and a small area of that world- a single town- has shown an enormous, unprecedented spike in aether activity in the past two years. My office doesn’t know that I’m here and your family’s name is not in our records. I do not share notes with them until I complete a job. At first, I suspected your husband.” Kern taps his fingertips on the tabletop sternly. “I no longer believe it is.”

Charlotte says nothing, tries to keep her face from giving anything away. In a world without plague prevention treatments, the people would not be resistant to aether. It would be a perfect ground for Mara and William to… experiment. To build their skills and prepare.

“Dr. Cross, is your daughter capable of this kind of behavior?” Kern’s face is still stern, but his voice is soft. When Charlotte doesn’t answer, he adds, softly, “I know about her childhood illness. I lost my son to the same. If I had the same choice as you… Well. If I am right, her survival is what allowed her transgressions. Even nonetheless, I am jealous. I would have done it too. Perhaps I am wrong, but I will be traveling to this world shortly to investigate. If she is your child, I am willing to work with you.”

Mara is not safe. “Yes,” Charlotte says quietly, and tells him a carefully edited history of her family. Kern sits and listens, nodding and jotting the occasional note. She finishes and waits for him to put away his notes before asking, in a carefully measured tone, “How bad is it?”

“It’s difficult to say,” Kern says. “We measure aether usage on other worlds, but nothing specific. I will proceed there in a few days, once I can make arrangements. I’m willing to send you messages about what I find, to whatever extent it is possible.”

“Please let her live,” Charlotte begs, an unexpected well of emotion rising within her. “Whatever she’s done, please let her live.” To her embarrassment, she feels her shoulders start to shake, her eyes start to burn.

Kern doesn’t flinch, doesn’t look away. “I’m obligated to protect others from her first and foremost, but I’ll do what I can. I will contact you if there’s anything you can do for her.”

She nods and thanks him as the first tears fall. He leaves her house. For the next several weeks, Charlotte waits anxiously for messages, for some kind of news. She dedicates the rest of her time to research, brainstorming, thinking of ways to contain Mara without hurting her.

Slowly, over the course of several months, messages trickle in. Kern explains, in clipped, broad terms, what Mara has done. She and William (though mostly Mara, Charlotte knows, William is too young to have much affinity with aether at all) have been implanting aether into the people there such that the effects are shaped by the people’s emotions or personality traits. The people are suffering immensely, terrified, as strange, impossible things happen around them.

At first, she is comforted by the notion that these people have no form of age suspension. Their lifespans are shockingly, brutally short, so regardless of what Mara does, it will be over soon. Almost as soon as she allows herself to think these cruel thoughts, it seems, she receives a letter telling her that Kern has confirmed what he suspected- the curses Mara gives are transmittable through family lines. There are toddlers manifesting abilities Mara gave to a parent years before.

Charlotte reads through all these messages with shaking hands until finally, over a year later, she receives one telling her to come. She doesn’t hesitate. She packs what she needs, slips on her ring, and heads for a thinny.

Tuwiuwok is a small colony in a very cold seaside town, and she comes in through a thinny well outside the village. Already, though, she can see the marks of what her daughter has done. There’s a field that’s almost entirely dead, everything blackened; there’s a tree with the trunk cracked from the roots up; there’s the smell of ash and rot in her nose. There have been too many disasters here.

Kern meets her well outside the borders and brings her to a strange hut well outside the village proper. On the way, he tells her that both Mara and William live. Other than that, he is quiet, shadowed.

“This is Charlotte,” he says to the woman in the hut. “Charlotte, this is Kina. She is helping us.”

Kina nods and does not make eye contact. When she speaks, it’s with the awkward hesitance of someone speaking in a language other than their own. Charlotte wonders why Kern has not told her that the two of them can understand any language. “Your garments are strange,” Kina says. “Change into the clothes there.” She gestures at a bundle on the floor.

Charlotte lifts the clothes- they’re rough, awkwardly sewn, and almost certainly unsuitable for any kind of weather. They do not much resemble Kina’s clothes, but Charlotte doesn’t care enough to ask. She sighs and changes into them.

“Do you know Mara?” she asks Kina.

Kina doesn’t look over, continuing the task she’s engaged with- some kind of crude technique for preserving food, Charlotte thinks. “Yes,” she says. “On their own, they struggle to find food, shelter. So they barter- I helped them. In return, Mara offered me… protection.” She pauses for a long moment, and then turns to Charlotte and says, “Witch or no, I am safer for what she gave me. Do not think that I help you lightly. It has gone too far.”

Charlotte nods. “You do not wish to see her dead?”

Kina hesitates. “Not everything she did has been bartered. Most was forced. Cruelty. She deserves death. Worse.”

“I didn’t ask what she deserves.”

Kina smiles, a sharp thing, and says, “I would gain no joy from her death.”

Charlotte nods again and smiles at this strange woman before turning to Kern. “Tell me about this world.”

Kern shrugs. “There is little technology here. No science that I’ve seen. And, ah, a shocking amount of social division. My complexion is rather more critical here than I was expecting.” He looks distinctly annoyed. “It’s been a terrible inconvenience and it has slowed my work here by months. You’ll have some problems too, as a woman. People care about that quite a bit here.” Kina looks bemused and startlingly bitter. As well as being a woman, her skin is between Charlotte’s and Kern’s in shade, and her hair is even darker than Charlotte’s, like ink.

Kern continues, “There are two primary groups of people- there are the Mi’kmaq, who call this place Tuwiuwok. They have been here much longer. Kina is one of them. Many of them are dead now. Many of them have aether in them now, but more of them were able to barter for it, or received less severe… treatment. To the Mi’kmaq, a person who can do what they cannot explain- magic, in their eyes- is special. Revered. They have treated Mara and William relatively well. All in all, their situation is much less severe than that of the colonists. They call this place Haven. The ones in charge all have your shade of skin. They have slightly more advanced weaponry. To them, a person who can perform magic is a witch. Witches are to be killed.”

“Killed?” Charlotte repeats breathlessly.

Kern nods. “They have repeatedly tried, with no success. She is unharmed.”

“My people were willing to help them, before, for a trade. They will not anymore,” Kina adds. “They are unfamiliar to this place. Finding food, shelter… It’s beyond them. If you do not succeed and the colonists do not succeed, winter will have its way soon enough.”

Charlotte files this away as something she can use, if she must. If nothing else, she can drag her daughter home with the threat of starvation. It’s comforting, for all its harshness.

Charlotte and Kern discuss some of the practicalities. Where Mara is living (in a well-hidden shack a few miles away), what her powers are now (enormous, but she still cannot do anything to overpower the plague prevention treatments, rendering Charlotte and Kern immune to everything), and how bad the situation is for the people of this area (bad). Charlotte asks what Kern plans to do with her when they catch her. Kern has no plan. It’s all right. Charlotte does.

It’s late into the night, long after Kina has left for her own home, when Charlotte runs out of questions she has any desire to ask. She doesn’t move away. This is only the second time she’s met Kern, but he’s spent nearly a year chasing her daughter, and he’s the only person alive who understands what’s become of her family. She’s comfortable in his presence in a way she hasn’t been comfortable with another person in years. She has nothing to fear from him. He already knows her worst secrets. Eventually, he moves and she grabs for him, sliding her hands onto his. He smiles at her, sadly, shakes her off, and goes to bed alone.

The next morning, Kina returns with food. Charlotte eats heartily before leaving to return to the Void, only briefly, only long enough to get what she needs. As much as anyone, she knows the dangers. She returns with a core of aether, a compression trick Adam used to show off when they were first dating. The controller crystal, she has in her bag. It’s been prepared for months. She is ready.

It’s only midmorning when Kern and Charlotte walk to Haven. There’s devastation- strange cracks in the cobbled streets, collapsed buildings, burn marks, water damage, wind damage, so much destruction that Charlotte has trouble tracking all of it. There are people walking around, mostly with their eyes averted. Kern explains that they are not trusted.

“Excuse me, madam,” a man says loudly, walking up to me. Kern huffs irritably. “I’m Jerome Anderson. I’m the constable here. How did you get here?” Charlotte hesitates and glances over at Kern for assistance. Jerome balks at the gesture. “I asked you. Where are you from?”

She straightens her spine. “I am here to help. I hear you have a problem with a witch.”

Jerome grins, showing too much of his falling-apart teeth. “We know how to take care of witches here. No need for more. G’on back, then. Take your slave and go back to where you came from.”

“From what I’ve been told, you have had some difficulty taking care of the witch,” Charlotte replies frostily, trying not to rear back with shock with how he refers to Kern. This place is filled with barbarians. Briefly, she sympathizes with Mara’s apparent desire to eradicate them.

Jerome steps forward, into her space. He is clearly trying to intimidate her. Charlotte narrows her eyes at him and does not retreat. Kern hovers a half-step behind her, ready to assist if needed.

“You’ll understand if I’m tired of having strangers in my town,” he growls at her. “Things start happenin,’ people die. Last thing I need is more witches, here to help or no. So take your deals with the devil, take your magic and get the hell out of my town before I burn you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Charlotte says crisply, and moves to walk around him. Jerome grabs her roughly by the arm and jerks her back to where she was standing. Charlotte stumbles slightly, shocked.

“Don’t touch her,” Kern says. He is calm, but his voice is low and dangerous.

Jerome sneers at her and doesn’t look over at Kern. Charlotte becomes acutely aware of the knife at his belt and the long metal cylinder strapped to his back, which she suspects to be a propulsion weapon of some kind.

“We know where Mara and William are,” Kern says. “We will bring them in, but we need somewhere to keep them. Is there a facility we could house them in? The church, perhaps?”

Jerome still doesn’t look at Kern. “I’ve mentioned previously that we seek no aid in bringing down the witches. Perhaps you can teach your slave to listen when he’s spoken to.”

“Why are we talking to this man?” Charlotte asks Kern, growing fed up.

Kern gives her a rather exasperated look but just says, “That will be all, Constable Anderson,” and leads her away. When they’re out of earshot, she says, “He’s one of the few in this town who has openly stood against Mara and William without manifesting a curse. As far as I can tell, she has thus far failed to get to him. As a result, he has a great deal of public support. He’s only been the constable for a short period of time. The last one was not so lucky.”

“What happened?” Charlotte asks.

“From what I understand, he shot William. Non-fatally, and William has healing powers. Later, he tried to shoot Mara, but she’d already had her revenge, and… well. The man is alive, but no longer fit to work the job. He probably never will be again.”

Charlotte nods. It’s frightening, of course, that her little girl is destroying people so casually. Still, Charlotte can’t help but think that the man who destroyed himself in the act of trying to shoot Mara deserves little of her sympathy.

“What do we do now?” she asks.

“We’ll need help to bring her in and a place to hold her. After that, it depends on you.”

“How many are there who will help us?” Charlotte asks.

Kern smiles grimly. “Enough. I’ve been gathering contacts- people who will help us and will not harm her if there are other options. We are travelling to inform some of the colonists now. Kina will gather the Mi’kmaq who will help.” Kern pauses, then asks, “There is one more question. What do you plan to do with William?”

Charlotte hesitates, frowning. “I have too few resources and too little energy to worry about him, or about this town. I am here for my daughter. That is all. If a solution presents itself, very well. If not… throw him into the Void, I suppose.”

They spend the day dropping in at various homes, speaking in hushed tones with terrified people. There’s a woman with a broken, twisted body and a blank expression on her face, whose brother bought her a life without the debilitating pain, only to receive a curse himself when he refused to help Mara again after she started killing. There’s a blacksmith who bought a curse on his rival and feels guilty about it now. There’s a couple who refuse to talk about what they did, but whose eyes drift to the baby triplets in their cradles every time the subject comes up. There are a few people of Kern’s complexion who refuse to speak in front of her, refuse to even meet her eyes. There are others, frightened, guilty people, willing to help keep Mara alive mostly because they feel complicit, or because they owe her something.

Charlotte and Kern spend several hours speaking with people. Charlotte learns new horrifying things that her daughter’s done. She learns about this world, as people turn up their noses at her and Kern even as they cooperate. Finally, a straight-backed widow offers them a building. It’s a barn, empty now, huge and wooden and dark. Kern pronounces it structurally sound enough to hold Mara and William.

There are another couple of houses and then Charlotte and Kern are hiking back to the Mi’kmaq village to meet Kina again. It’s already dusk- the days are short, and Charlotte can’t tell if it’s the season or the world.

On the way, Charlotte spots an enormous monster stalking its way through the forest and freezes, gasping. Kern has to grab her by the arm and steer her quietly away. When they’re presumably out of earshot of the thing, Charlotte gasps that she can’t believe her daughter created such a thing, only for Kern to explain that it is a moose and apparently endemic to this world. He explains that he made several such mistakes at first. He’s just finishing up a rather alarming story about a creature called a bear when they reach the hut.

There’s food out in rough clay dishes on the ground, and Kina’s stitching. She glances up and says, “We have what we expected from my people.”

“As do we,” Kern says. “Thank you.”

Kina shrugs. “I do not do this for you.”

“Charlotte was introduced to Constable Anderson today,” Kern begins carefully. “He’ll guess that we’re about to make our move.”

Kina’s hands hesitate for a long moment. Still, her voice is steady when she says, “I have no fear of Jerome. When will we make our next move?”

“We have a barn that should work,” Kern says. “Hopefully, we have enough people to bring them in, and they know to be ready to move.” After that, they discuss signals- apparently there is a lighthouse that they can use to signal their helpers when it is time- and eat in silence. Kina leaves again and they sit. Eventually, Kern states that there is no point in wasting time, and they should move tomorrow, if Charlotte is prepared. She is prepared- there is nothing else she needs to carry it out- but she is not ready. Still, she explains her plan in a voice that won’t stop shaking.

“It cannot be you,” Kern says after a long silence. “You cannot be the one who controls the mechanism.” Charlotte stares at him, gaping. “You are her mother. If it fails… other actions will have to be taken. The safety of these people must come first. You cannot commit to that.”

“Then I have nothing else,” she tells him, defiantly, confident that he’ll give in.

“I will go,” Kern says softly.

She stares at him. “It will kill you. You have no reason to- you should not die for my family. Nor for these people who, I assume, have treated you terribly for the past year.”

“I know, Charlotte. It’s the best solution. You have not seen how bad it is here. We cannot afford not to take the best solution,” Kern tells her. His voice is steady, but Charlotte sees his hands shaking, and grabs them gently, hoping to steady them with her own. It doesn’t work. Her hands are trembling too. He allows her, though, and does not pull away this time.

“I have nothing left,” she confesses, as if he doesn’t know. “My husband is dead, my daughter… I have nothing to return to. You-” Kern raises her eyebrows, and she questions herself. For everything he knows about her, she knows next to nothing about him, except that he lost a son and works a job that requires him to traverse worlds. From his face, she gathers that he has no home to return to either.

“I swore I would protect these people first and foremost,” Kern’s eyes are low and shadowed in the firelight. “Let me do that.”

Charlotte bows her head against his shoulder. “I don’t know why you would do this when you could kill my daughter and save your own life.”

“If it were my son…”

“It isn’t.”

“Yes. Well.” Kern feels warm and solid and human against her. She knows that if this goes successfully tomorrow, he will never be like this again.

“I know it’s not for me, but thank you. These people would thank you, too, if they weren’t…” It’s the wrong thing to say, and he pulls back from her.

“Tomorrow, then,” he says, and goes to ready his cot. Charlotte cannot think of anything left to say. She gets very little sleep.

They leave with Kina before dawn the next morning and proceed immediately to the lighthouse, where Kern rises to the top and flashes the light in a code, calling their allies to help them. Charlotte watches the water. There is some beauty in this place. Solis has nothing like this left- untouched places, nature against nature- it has all advanced past that. It’s beautiful, and terrible, and she will not miss it when she goes.

From there, they begin the long hike to Mara’s hideout. She and William have hidden themselves far from either the Mi’kmaq or colonist settlements, and Kina warns her to prepare herself for a long walk. They have barely passed the colonist area when they all turn to the sound of feet.

Jerome Anderson is standing there scowling, with his propulsion weapon in his hands. Behind him are an assortment of several equally armed pale men.

“We can take care of our own damn problems. Last thing we need is more witchcraft,” Jerome tells them, brandishing his weapon angrily.

“You have tried,” Kern points out. “Repeatedly. Now it is our turn. We will end this, and keep you and your families safe.”

“Heard that before,” one of Jerome’s men mutters.

“We got our share of troubles here, but they’re our troubles, understand?” Jerome growls. “We have no interest in outsiders.”

“The problems here might be yours, but she’s mine,” Charlotte says. It’s clearly the wrong thing to say, judging by how the weapons turn toward her. She doesn’t flinch.

“Leave, Jerome,” Kina says. “What’s done is done. Go home. Wait for the end.”

He looks at her, lip curling. “Kina. Yet to come to your senses, I see.”

Kina raises an eyebrow. “My senses,” she repeats. She visibly dismisses the thought and says again, “Go home.”

Jerome strides forward, until he is close enough to tower over them. “Do you think I take orders from you, Kina?”

Kina smiles, then, sharply, and steps forward as well. “Why do you try to intimidate me? What are you going to do, Jerome? Strike me again?”

Everything about this interaction has led Charlotte to believe that Jerome certainly will strike her, but instead, he pales and takes a half-step backward, yielding ground and looking momentarily afraid.

“In answer to your question, yes. I do expect you to take an order from me. Go home now,” Kina says calmly.

Jerome scowls, then leers and says, “You have been mine, Kina. Whatever sorcery you’ve bought, whatever deals you’ve made with any devil you could find, you won’t forget where you’ve been.”

Kina’s chin tilts up, rebellious and proud. She looks him in the eye and slowly, deliberately, steps toward him. He steps back again, hastily, out of her reach. Her voice is calm, even a trace amused, when she speaks again. “It is done. All of it is done. Go now.”

Jerome’s eyes flick to his weapon, as if contemplating shooting her in cold blood, but eventually he sneers at her and orders his men out. With little more fanfare, they exit.

“This is why we’re with Kina,” Kern tells Charlotte as the men stomp angrily away. “No one in this town would lay a hand to her.”

Kina’s smirking after the men. She turns to Charlotte and says, satisfied, “This is why I do not wish to see your daughter dead.” She hesitates, smile fading, and more soberly asks. “Kern has said that you wish to… eliminate, or at least suspend these curses. Is there a way you could spare mine?”

Charlotte shakes her head. “No. It will not pick and choose. I’m sorry.”

Kina nods, jaw tense. “Then I must not stay when you do it. I have been like this for… over two years, now. I have defied Jerome many times. I do not wish to stay for his retribution. I must run while I am still safe.”

Kern nods. “I understand. Whenever you need to. Thank you for your assistance.” Kina inclines her head slightly and does not otherwise reply.

They continue walking. Charlotte spots another moose- at a distance, this time, and much less intimidating- but thankfully does not see any bears. It’s fully morning and finally warming under the tree canopy when Kern stops abruptly and points. At first, Charlotte sees nothing, but then spots the structure of a makeshift door against a wall of rock and dirt. A cave, then.

There’s a whistle, and they turn to find a group of nearly a dozen approaching. They are Mi’kmaq, and quiet. They greet Kina warmly and mostly ignore Charlotte and Kern. The group is quiet, not wanting to alert William and Mara, as they wait for the others. The colonists do not arrive as one group, but trickle in solo or in pairs or triads. When Kern estimates that there are all of them, he directs them to fan out around the mouth of the cave. Charlotte stands behind Kern at the door, the only unarmed member of the group, though she has been offered weapons. She cannot bear the thought of using them, so she stands empty-handed, preparing to see her daughter for the first time in three years.

Kern opens the door and hoists his weapon. There is nothing on the other side. For a moment, Charlotte’s heart stops, certain that they have the wrong place. Then her eyes adjust and she spots them both, asleep on the ground, wrapped in several layers of patched blankets.

Charlotte looks to Kern for confirmation and walks closer to the pair. William’s hands are holding Mara, Mara’s grasping the blanket. They look dirty, and though Charlotte can’t yet confirm it’s them, something smells quite bad.

She sighs and says, aloud, “Wake up, Mara.”

Mara blinks sleepily, looking first at William and then, with slow horror, up at Charlotte. She yelps, kicks William, and tries to scramble up. William’s grip impedes her as he tightens his grasp, grumbling.

“Still, Mara. I’m not alone,” Charlotte orders, and Mara stops struggling, looks toward the door.

“Ah. At last, the cavalry,” Mara says coolly. Her voice is rough from sleep, which more or less ruins the effect. Against all reason, Charlotte has to fight down a smile.

William’s waking up, too, his eyes flicking from Charlotte to the door in alarm. Charlotte glances around the cave for weapons. There are none that she sees, though of course there will be aether. In the low light, it’s hard to see it clearly, but Charlotte can sense its presence.  

“It’s nice to see you, dear,” Charlotte tells her daughter quietly.

Mara laughs, a bit hysterically. “Sure, mother. All the men with muskets make this feel just like home.”

“You understand why I had to.” Charlotte kneels on the hard ground- packed dirt, here, not as stiff as the rocks, but still hardly an acceptable bed. “It’s over, Mara. Stand up slowly. If you don’t fight us, I won’t let them hurt you.”

Mara’s eyes are wild for a moment, but she does stand slowly. She’s naked, and clearly trying to hide her shivering, but what draws Charlotte’s alarm are her ribs, visible and stark. Mara’s emaciated or close to, her stomach sunken, her bones jutting out of her skin. William, beside her, is the same- perhaps even worse. Fine, pale hair covers both their bodies, a sign of severe malnutrition. There is dirt streaked over both of them, and Mara’s hair is chopped short and matted in the back.

Charlotte tries to speak, can’t, and takes a moment to breathe. “Get dressed,” she finally says.

Mara jumps to do so, grabbing at her clothes and sneering at the few men daring look at her body. The fashions of this place involve far too many items- particularly for women, it seems, as William has a considerably easier time- but Mara puts on all of them. For warmth, Charlotte guesses. She can barely breathe.

Charlotte- and all the assembled, she imagines- watches carefully for either of them grabbing weapons. She sees nothing. It hardly matters. Mara’s skill with aether is far more frightening than any secreted knife.

When they’re dressed, Charlotte says, “Come. Slowly. Don’t try to escape.”

“What’s the plan, Mother?” Mara asks. “You’re not going to kill me. To the Void with Father’s grave? After all, I’m sure you didn’t intend to kill him, either.”

Charlotte ignores the barb and asks gently, “Do you plan to cooperate?”

Mara’s lip curls up and she’s tense for a fight, but the advantage is far from hers and she must know it. William puts a hand on her shoulder and they exchange looks.

“We will come with you,” Mara says stiffly. “Where do you intend to take us?”

“Just outside the colony. In the farmland,” Charlotte says, ignoring the hissing of some of her allies concerned by her honesty. “It’s a long walk. Can you make it?”

Mara’s spine stiffens and she scowls in the offended way that she only does when the concern is valid. Charlotte’s sharply reminded of when Mara was nine and wore this expression, insisting that she was better at the piano than anyone else in the competition and didn’t need to warm up, shortly before losing the competition badly. Charlotte abruptly can’t quite remember how it got this bad.

“Right.” She sighs and turns to her allies. “They are weak. We will have to stop and rest, feed them some if possible. It’s possible that we may have to carry them.” This suggestion makes Mara look even more outraged, but she doesn’t even try to contradict the notion.

Kern nods. Some of the rest grumble, but don’t try to argue with her. Charlotte guides William and Mara out of the cave, surrounds them in the pack of her allies, and slowly begin to move to the barn. The walk is quiet and relatively calm. William and Mara are prideful, but not too prideful to demand breaks when they need them. One of the Mi’kmaq men eventually hands them both bread and what smells like dried fish of some kind, and they both fall on it with very little dignity. Charlotte has to avert her eyes.

They reach the barn and the widow who owns it just before noon. She lets them in before quietly retreating to her home to let them do what they will. The woman with the twisted body and her brother are there, as well, waiting silently in the grass. Charlotte’s feet and hips are sore- she’s never had to do much walking at once, and the past few days have been intense- but she’s all right. William and Mara are swaying on their feet, so she leaves them in the grass with the group of her allies. She puts Kina in charge, which some of the colonists are unhappy about, but no one protests.

Charlotte and Kern go into the barn. It’s cluttered, here and there, and dirty, but well-built and secure. It will work for their purposes. She pulls the controller crystal and aether core from her bag and hesitates, looking at Kern carefully.

“I’m sure,” he assures her, and plucks the crystal from her hands. Charlotte stands still in an empty barn and watches him die, watches him sink from human being to mechanism. When he looks up again, it is with eyes that show no emotion. He is no longer a person, not really. It is her doing and it still makes her shiver.

They do the rest methodically. Charlotte is a scientist and this is carefully planned, in separate steps, and they go through it carefully. It takes only a few minutes before the barn is much more than a structure. Charlotte adds the rest, carefully, everything she’s thought of to protect Mara in the meantime: age suspension, memory replacement capabilities, material generation. She’s thought through it carefully, and her hypotheses prove correct. It all goes smoothly.

“I understand the cycles,” the remnant of Kern says. “What is the end to this? How will you know when she is ready?”

Charlotte hesitates. She’s had a few thoughts about this, none particularly solidified. “A selfless act. When she gives up something she loves for this place, these people.”

“What does she love?”

This is where Charlotte stalls too. “William, I suppose. Not the man- I don’t get the impression that she cares much for him in particular, for all he adores her- but what he does. The purpose he serves.” It’s not much, now that Adam’s dead, but it’s all she’s been able to think of.

He considers this silently for a moment. “You want her to sacrifice William for the people here.”

“William, or whoever replaces him,” Charlotte says. “Yes. If she- if she can do that, ever, then she will have recovered. I’ve created this place to stop all of it, then, so she can come home.”

“Kill all the cursed.” His face is expressionless. She still expects him to express quiet grief at this notion, but, of course, he can’t.

“There’s hardly another solution. Perhaps it will not happen that way. Perhaps she will be able to undo it, later.” Charlotte doesn’t hold out a lot of hope. Adam’s research had never shown much possibility of aether effect reversal. Still, Mara knows more about aether than he ever did already. She may still find a way, if she ever chooses to.

Soon it is done and Charlotte emerges from the Barn about an hour after she went in and goes to the group on the field. What’s left of Kern stands behind her, silent and stiff, present only to avoid alarming the people gathered.

Mara immediately leaps to her feet, cornered and terrified and outraged. William immediately echoes the motion, backing her. “So, what’s happening here?” Mara demands. “What’s the brilliant plan, Mother?”

“It is a solution. To end this without allowing you to get hurt.”

Mara just stares defiantly at her. “That is not an answer.”

“Can I speak to you alone for a moment?” William asks, interrupting. Mara turns toward him, stunned. He shrugs and adds, “She’s your mother. She’s not going to kill you. I just want to avoid the family burial plot, if that’s all right with you, darling.” Mara snorts, waves a hand and clearly granting him permission.

“Fine,” Charlotte says, waving him along. Kern comes with her, and they pull William from the group. “You’re here to beg for your life.”

“Not particularly, no,” William responds. He’s oddly cheerful, but measured, calculating. “The Barn. We could see some of what you were doing. It’s her prison, right? Until she becomes the little princess you always wanted.” Charlotte narrows her eyes at him, but he hurries right along and adds, “You should send me with her.”

“Why,” Charlotte says flatly, barely a question.

“Because I can keep her safe.”

Charlotte raises her eyebrows. “Clearly.”

“Yes, clearly,” William says, challenging. “You saw us completely naked this morning. I saw the look on your face. Underfed, filthy, probably very smelly, and not a scratch or a bruise on either of us. You’re some kind of a doctor. What are the odds?”

Charlotte blinks and then narrows her eyes at him, because she hadn’t noticed then, but now she has to admit that she should have expected more injuries. “Explain, then.”

“My skills with aether are mostly in healing,” William tells her. He scowls and adds, “Do you have any idea how hard it is to go on a revenge bent with healing powers? Requires some creativity, for sure.”

“Healing,” Charlotte repeats flatly.

William grins at her and says, “If you go over there and cut Mara, right now, you’ll see the same mark appear on me instantaneously, and then you’ll see them both heal. We’re connected, so I can heal us both. If it weren’t for that, she’d be dead… a half dozen times over, at least.”

“That’s impossible. You’ve both been treated for plague prevention. Aether won’t work on you,” Charlotte points out.

William smiles fondly. “We’ve been connected like this far before we turned eighteen. I can keep her safe.  If you throw me into the Void, the connection will break. I won’t be able to protect her.”

Charlotte hesitates. There’s no reason she couldn’t, she supposes- the memory replacement could work on William too, though having two of them might complicate things somewhat- and she believes that he is telling the truth. Still, though. To be honest, she has no interest in saving him, and aside from his healing powers, he is a liability. He will make it harder for her daughter to recover and come home. She thinks quickly, weighing pros and cons, and then-

“Can you put your healing powers into the Barn?” Charlotte asks, the inspiration hitting her abruptly. She likes the plan, almost commits herself to it even before he answers.

William’s face shutters, any real emotion disappearing under a thick veneer of bright sharpness, and she knows she has him. A moment later, he admits it. “Yes. But it’ll only work when she’s in it. If anything happens outside- it’ll work better if you just send me with her.”

He’s not wrong, but she doesn’t care. “Do it.”

William’s face twists into a grimace, but he sets off toward the Barn with Charlotte and Kern trailing behind him. He walks around a corner- out of Mara’s sight, Charlotte realizes. “I need aether.”

Charlotte pulls a small sphere of it from her bag. “This is all you’re getting. Use it for anything else, and you’ll have lost your chance to protect her.”

William nods, focused now, and he crushes the aether in his hands, carefully coating his palms and fingers with it. It’s no surprise that he uses Mara’s technique. He walks up to the Barn and presses his hands against the wooden surface. He stays for a long moment, focusing, leaning his entire body into it and resting his forehead against the surface. When he pulls back, there are two handprints- black and glowing amber.

“It’s done. If she’s in here, she’ll be healed. Resurrected, even, if it comes to it,” he tells her. He doesn’t even bother pretend to brag. “If she needs help outside it and I’m still alive, come get me.”

Charlotte nods. “Thank you,” she says, and means it.

“If she ever finds out I helped create her prison, even like this, she’ll kill me,” William says matter-of-factly. “We have that sort of relationship. So I’d prefer you didn’t mention it.” Charlotte inclines her head in acquiescence. They lead him back to a questioning Mara.

There are a few new people there, Mi’kmaq, with a few large beasts Charlotte distantly recognizes as horses. They still have horses on Solis, though Charlotte suspects she’s never seen one in person before.

Kina moves to stand beside Charlotte. “You have everything under control here.”

“It should be smooth from here,” Charlotte says warily. “You’re leaving, then?”

“I must.” Kina toys with what appears to be a thick pair of rough gloves. “There are people, west of here, who will take me in. I should be safe.”

“I’m glad. Thank you for your help,” Charlotte says sincerely. “I have no right to ask you for anything, but I will. As you know, this structure is tied to a twenty-seven-year-cycle.” Mara is only twenty-seven. By the time she has to come back here, her entire lifetime will have passed again. Charlotte prays it will be enough.

“The Hunter,” Kina says. “Of course. Who did you think told Kern about it?”

“I see. Well, the curses will become active again in, say, twenty-five, twenty-six years. And then my daughter will come back, but with different memories.”

Kina nods. “She will, of course, be in some danger. You ask me to come back to protect her.”

“Yes.”

“I can make no commitments now, but I have no desire to see her harmed. I will keep a note of it.”

Charlotte nods. “I understand. Thank you, and good luck.” Behind her, Kern echoes similar sentiments, though his voice is flat and affectless. Kina smiles, puts on the gloves, and very carefully climbs onto a horse. Beside her, other Mi’kmaq also mount- much more quickly and smoothly- and they ride away.

“Mara,” Charlotte says quietly, turning to her daughter. “It’s time. There’s no point in fighting. Come to the Barn.”

Mara snarls, whips around, comes face to face with several knives. She turns back toward Charlotte, saccharine now. “Really, a Barn? Come on, Mother. Just take me home. I’m sure you’ve looked into treatment centers… I mean, the Barn surely doesn’t have double-blind studies and meta-analysis.”

“Do you believe I haven’t thought this through? I am a scientist,” Charlotte replies. “This will work. This will help you.”

“Fix me, you mean,” Mara says, crossing her arms a bit petulantly. “Punish me until I’m ready to apologize and forget that you murdered my father.”

Charlotte’s done listening to this. “Come now, Mara. Don’t try to fight.” She directs her attention to the group surrounding her and adds, “Drag her if you must, but be gentle. And be careful of William.”

Mara walks to the Barn under her own power in the end. The rest of the group stops at the door- two of them holding William’s arms, because he won’t stop trying to embrace Mara dramatically- and Charlotte, Kern, and Mara enter the Barn. Charlotte closes the doors and for a moment it’s dim, but then Kern makes a face and the walls suddenly glow an intense, blinding white. It begins to make a rushing sound.

And then Mara starts laughing. It’s sudden, and victorious, with more than a hint of cruelty. “You made a mistake, Mother,” Mara taunts over the sounds. “You must have missed something in your calculations.”

That shouldn’t be possible, but Mara sounds certain. Charlotte demands, “What?!”

Mara looks over the Barn and very firmly says one word: “No.” With that, the rushing subsides, the white vanishes, and they are inside a barn once more.

“I didn’t feel it before, but she must consent,” Kern murmurs to Charlotte. “It will not work unless she allows it.”

Charlotte claps a hand to her mouth and has to push back a sob as she realizes. She should have seen it before- the signs must have been there- but it doesn’t matter now. She’s failed. She’s failed as a scientist and as a parent, again.

Mara ignores this and opens the door. William immediately bursts free of the men holding him and swoops her up into an embrace. There are enough gathered to keep them from escaping. Charlotte needs to think of a backup plan, something else, anything else, but right now she can’t think. She can’t stop shaking. Kern lays a hand on her shoulder, but it’s cold and offers no comfort- only more guilt. A good man has died for this plan, and it’s going to fail. She’s going to fail.

She’s not sure how long she stands there, trying not to fall apart, before her panic is interrupted by commotion outside the doors. She looks up, questioningly, and listens to the talk. Apparently Constable Anderson and several of his men are approaching.

Charlotte steels herself and steps outside. It’s true, several pale men- more than ambushed them this morning- are approaching them.

“Oh, it’s Jerome! Excellent,” William observes cheerfully. “Got aether, darling?”

Mara smiles sharply. “I can’t believe I almost died without giving him something to remember me by.”

“Don’t go near him,” Charlotte says sharply.

William raises an eyebrow. “I know you haven’t been in town long, but you can trust us on this- the man deserves a curse. Several, even. We’d been planning on it, but things happen.”

“I imagine she’s aware,” Mara adds, a bit distantly. Her eyes are glittering maniacally, her fingers twitching.

“And his children? His grandchildren?” Charlotte demands.

Mara shrugs. “Lifespans in this place are pathetic. Only way to leave an impact. Nothing personal. …Definitely personal with Jerome, but that’s just a perk.”

“Restrain them. Don’t let them get close to the constable,” Kern instructs the assembled as Jerome and his team get closer. All of them are holding a propulsion weapon. Most of them look normal, but one is covered in sores, another’s face is entirely covered by a large dark hood, a third is glowing strangely.

Jerome surveys the crowd with a sneer. “So. This is your alliance.” His disdain seems particularly aimed at the Mi’kmaq and women present. “Kina left? Shame.”

“There is nothing for you here,” Kern says flatly. “Take your men and go.”

“Or stay,” Mara purrs. “Come a little closer. I promise I won’t give you anything you don’t deserve.” Charlotte glances over to see one of Mara’s hands black against the fabric of her skirt.

“Bind their hands,” she orders immediately. Mara scowls as a man jumps to obey, careful not to let her grab him but still rough with her. A moment later, William and Mara both have their hands tied tightly behind their backs.

“I’ve told you I have no patience for witchcraft,” Jerome says, studying the Barn dubiously. “I don’t know what you plan to do here, but it won’t stop their evil.”

“You’ve tried shooting us,” Mara says. “Crushing us. Burning us. Drowning us. And every time, you have been the ones who ended up hurt. Have you come up with a new plan? Or is it just that a woman and a man you would call a slave might succeed where you failed, using techniques you call evil, to save your pitiful lives? Are you anything more than ashamed?”

“Do not listen to her trickery,” Jerome immediately tells his group. “She has been in congress with the devil.”

“Rude,” William mutters.

“You don’t have to worry,” Mara taunts them. “They have failed, just as you have. I suppose that makes them your equals, but nothing more. They cannot contain me. I will not be contained. Go home while you still can. Don’t bring more disaster on yourselves.”

Jerome hoists his weapon instead. “If anyone other than the witches want to clear out of the way, now might be a good time. If not, well, I’ve got no complaint killing her allies.”

The man with the hood shakes it off abruptly and says, “Jerome, put the musket down.”

Everyone on both sides immediately begins to gaze at the man. “Of course, Michael,” Jerome breathes, dropping the weapon. Everyone else just stares fondly at him.

William headbutts the man holding him and then the man holding Mara. Mara takes off sprinting toward Jerome. A few people react, but languidly, still distracted by their adoration. Charlotte hesitates, weaponless and slow.

A ball of aether flies from Mara’s hand to her mouth just as Mara slams her shoulder into Jerome, knocking him back into the grass. She straddles him smoothly, crushing the aether between her lips and then kissing him violently, pinning him. It’s brief, only an instant before she spits him out and he bucks her off, throwing her laughing into the grass. Mara’s unable to stand, weak and with her hands tied, so she stays and laughs in the dirt, even as Jerome stands and kicks her viciously in the ribs. Charlotte can see the prints from the aether, an echo of Mara’s lips on and around Jerome’s.

“Jerome, back off now,” Michael tells him, and immediately Jerome is pulled back into the spell, smiling at him and forgetting about Mara. Charlotte walks over to the others and pulls her daughter to her feet.

“What did you do to him?” Charlotte asks.

Mara grins. There are flecks of aether on her teeth. “Something special. Relax, mother, nothing he didn’t have coming.”

“What do you need from me?” Michael asks her.

“Get these fools to let me go,” Mara replies, which manages to break through the reverie enough to get some half-hearted noises of complaint. “You know they want to fix the curses, don’t you, Michael? I assume you don’t want that.”

Michael pales and looks around at everyone gazing happily at him and asks, “How could they end the curses? You said this would be for the rest of my life.”

“I didn’t anticipate this,” she hisses. “It hasn’t worked yet, but they’re going to try to manipulate me- if you want to keep what I gave you, get me out of here.”

 “Manipulate you?” Michael asks. “They’re going to make you take away my gift? Why would you?”

“I won’t, you thick bastard! They want to force me into the Barn, but obviously I have no plans-”

“The Barn?” Jerome says, catching this. “If you go into the Barn, this ends? Whatever you just did to me-” He looks wildly unstable, then, gleaming eyes and sweaty skin. The prospect of dodging his curse overrules whatever allure Michael has.

Mara realizes her mistake and snarls at him. “Michael!” she hollers, and for the first time, there’s an edge of desperation in her voice. Michael looks uncertain, hovering toward the edge, clearly undecided about getting in the path of Jerome’s anger.

Jerome lunges- at first, Charlotte thinks he’s going for Mara, but he knocks her to the side and grabs Charlotte instead. He fists one hand in her hair and spins her against him, disorienting her, and pins her shoulder with his other arm. Charlotte panics at the feel of him against her, hot and sweaty and rancid, and struggles. There’s a sharp pain in her neck. She stills immediately, heart pounding.

“Do it, then.” Jerome’s voice is low and dangerous. “Do it or I’ll gut her.”

Mara is on the ground, again, from being knocked to the side by Jerome. The rest of the crowd- Charlotte’s allies and Jerome’s- are all still, silent. They wait.

The only one who speaks is William. “Do it,” he says, goading Jerome. “She was trying to trap us, kill us. You think Mara’d die for her?”

“She’s on your side, you fool,” Mara says acidly. “She’s the only one here with a hope of helping you, and you’d kill her to spite me?”

“Yes,” Jerome says, and slices a bit deeper into Charlotte’s neck. She gasps. A trail of blood begins trickling down her neck. “Either way, one less witch in this town. Your choice, Mara.”

It’s then that Charlotte sees the look on Mara’s face. She’s pale, eyes wide. After everything, after Adam, Mara still doesn’t want to watch her die. Charlotte doesn’t know if it will be enough, but it brings her a measure of relief.

“Kern,” Mara orders. “Pick me up.” Kern obeys, walking over and plucking her brusquely from the dirt. Mara casts a glance toward Michael, toward Charlotte’s allies- the people who’ve bought their curses. “If any of you wish to keep your curses, free my mother from this man.”

Several of Kern’s men point their own weapons toward Charlotte. Everyone else hesitates and ultimately does not move.

“I’m sorry, Charlotte, Mara,” one of her allies says- the man whose sister lies on the grass, away from the conflict, her body too destroyed to walk on her own. “It has gone too far.”

Mara scowls at him, returns her attention to her mother, scowls at her too.

“No,” William says, frantic now. He struggles against the grasp of the men holding him still. “Mara, no! Don’t do this. Stay with me. Please, I love you, I won’t let you do this.”

Mara turns away from Charlotte and begins walking toward William and Charlotte’s group. Walks right past them, toward the Barn.

“Mara!” William howls, thrashing fruitlessly against the grip of his captors. “I’ll come for you. As long as there is breath in my body, I’ll be yours. I love you. I will find you. I will save you. I promise.”

Mara turns back to him, smiling slightly. “I look forward to it,” she says. She blows him a kiss, turns away again, and walks into the Barn.

For a moment nothing happens, and Charlotte wonders if she has failed again. Then Kern says, “It is working.” A moment later, he and the Barn glow brightly, and then vanish. The Barn leaves behind nothing but a rectangle of dirt surrounded by grass. Kern leaves behind nothing at all.

The woman with the crippled body screams suddenly, convulsing in the grass. Her brother runs to her and can’t console her.

William moans, goes limp until his captors have to drop him, and collapses onto the grass. He lets out a loud shriek and then just lies, limply, into the grass where he’s fallen, unable or unwilling to move.

Michael suddenly becomes much less interesting to all assembled.

Jerome relaxes enough that Charlotte can wrest herself out of his grip without further harm to herself. She presses fingers to her neck, but the cut’s shallow and already clotting. 

It’s done. Mara’s safe in the Barn, and now that she’s gone in, everything Charlotte’s done to the structure should work. Kern will take care of her. The people in this place will get some respite- at least those for whom the curses are really curses. It’s over.

The rest of the day goes by relatively smoothly, which is fortunate, because Charlotte’s a bit disconnected from it all. She sends Jerome and his men away, and takes a despondent William to a thinny. He jokes weakly, “You know, Mara and I aren’t actually married, no need to induct me into the family traditions,” as she takes his ring (Mara will still have both hers and Adam’s, Charlotte realizes belatedly- but soon, she won’t remember what they’re for). William does not put up much of a fight when she pushes him through the thinny into the Void. She wishes him better luck than Adam had, though not much better.

She walks through the town once more- both colonist and Mi’kmaq areas- but she’s not really welcome here, and without Kern to guide her, the town just seems barbaric and confusing. She listens to the people celebrate, but it doesn’t touch her. She finds a thinny and returns to Solis.

There is nothing left for her in Solis, really, but Charlotte is a scientist, and there is always that. She continues working in the areas of memory alteration, working long nights. She picks up side projects related to the Barn, just in case. She tries not to worry.

After twenty-six years, she receives the first message from Kern. Mara has been re-released into Haven, under the name Abigail. So far, all has gone to plan.

Five months later, Kern sends her a message telling her that he made a mistake during the Hunter- in pulling Mara and the Barn away from that world, he accidentally left a thinny open, and the Croatoan briefly got through. It briefly resided in Haven, creating a single curse- Kern has identified the man who was cursed, but has no idea what the curse is, as of yet. The Croatoan then traveled several hundred miles south and completely destroyed another colony, for reasons Kern cannot ascertain. He assures Charlotte that he secured the Croatoan back in the void and that Mara is safe. He apologizes for the mistake. Charlotte reads the letter several times through and cannot come up with any feelings about it. Even the Croatoan, the monster that killed her husband, cannot elicit any emotion. Mara is safe, though, and that’s what she reminds herself of. Mara is safe.

Centuries pass this way. Charlotte continues refining her plan, occasionally returning to Haven when Mara is not there to fine-tune things. She goes back to the lighthouse Kern once used to signal the people she could trust and she puts aether in it, puts power in the place. She works with the Guard in Solis and, on rare occasions, the Guard in Haven. She realizes that she needs a link to the Barn, something other than Kern, and spends a century and a half hypothesizing.

There is a plant endemic to Solis known as the gedory. The gedory is well-known for being the first plant life to grow again after ecological disasters- fire, ice, famine, disease, it doesn’t seem to matter. The gedory is skilled at drawing nutrients from destroyed earth, at creating life from destruction. It is not good at competing with other plants for resources, and so it is rarely seen in full bloom outside of recent disaster zones. When planning her connection to the Barn, Charlotte keeps an image of the gedory beside her image of Mara at her workstation. She masters it, after a few missteps. There is no gedory in Haven’s world, and so the link instead becomes known by a rough translation. ‘Child of ruin’ has rather the wrong connotation, Charlotte thinks, even if it is accurate enough.

It has been well over four centuries since Charlotte lost her daughter the first time. It is almost time for the curses- the Troubles, the people of Haven call them Troubles now- to begin activating again. She must secure the child of ruin. Time is always tight this time of the cycle, but Charlotte has yet to fail.

The child of ruin must be pure of heart, Charlotte decided early on, which is difficult to translate into numbers and figures but easy enough to will. She gets her equipment in order. A woman comes in, introduces herself- her name is Amy- and Charlotte goes over the plan with her. Charlotte has contracts within an adoption center that she uses to find possibilities, and they have sent Amy to her.

Charlotte explains the procedure: she will use the machines to inject a very carefully measured amount of aether into Amy’s fetus. If the fetus is suitable, the aether will attach and Amy will receive a great deal of money to go through with the adoption through Charlotte, and there will be additional requirements for the birth. If not, Amy’s body will clear out the aether, she will receive a small compensation for her time and go back to the adoption agency.

Solis has loosened restrictions on aether use, slightly- just enough that Charlotte can get away with doing this. There are always at least a dozen attempts before she finds the right baby.

Amy agrees. She’s a small woman, and fidgets a bit anxiously as Charlotte carefully puts the equipment in place and pushes the plunger. Charlotte watches the monitors carefully. She smiles as the monitors change slightly- it has worked. She has her child of ruin for the cycle after the one approaching. Amy nods nervously when the rest of the procedures are explained in more detail.

The money goes through without a problem and Amy accompanies her through a thinny. They go to a town just outside of Haven and settle in a bed and breakfast until it’s time for Amy to give birth. It won’t be much longer now. The year here is 1981.

After two weeks, Kern shows up at their door one morning. It is the day. Charlotte accompanies Amy to the nearest hospital, where she introduces herself as Amy’s obstetrician, and demands that they induce labor. Thirteen hours later, the baby is born. Amy asks to hold her, just once, and to name her, and is granted permission. After that, Kern flashes some credentials and takes custody of baby Jennifer. He assures Amy that he has located her adoptive parents, and that the Masons are wonderful people.

Kern vanishes to take care of the adoption, so Charlotte directs Amy back through the thinny and goes to the Barn to wait. Mara is unconscious, still- a Trouble came back today, but it won’t be time for her to emerge for another couple of years. Her hair is long and dark, with bangs covering her forehead. She lies on the ground, oblivious to Charlotte’s presence, twitching occasionally.

Eventually Kern comes back and updates Charlotte. This version of Mara is named Lucy Ripley. She is a social worker, a pacifist. She will be good for Haven, he tells her. Charlotte asks after her grandson, the baby born shortly before Mara- Sarah, then- went into the Barn last cycle. He is apparently grown, and healthy. Charlotte resigns herself to never meeting him. She strokes Mara’s new hair- different even in texture, now- kisses her forehead, runs a few diagnostic checks on the Barn, and goes back to Solis.

Sometime Charlotte feels guilt about the children of ruin- there have been several, now, one every cycle since she began the process. She never means for them to suffer, but mistakes have been made and sometimes they do. Still, she creates them, one every twenty-seven years. She takes them from their home world and places them in a world with brutally short life expectancies for her own usage, her own convenience. After all this time, and she’s finally proven herself to be Adam’s wife, Mara’s mother. She’s careful to minimize risks, but she would never have accepted that excuse from either of them. Charlotte knows how to control aether, knows how to put it in another to get what she needs. She is one of them.

Charlotte is a mother, and a devoted one at that. After everything, after years of trying and failing to raise the stubborn girl by the standard route, she has bent space and time and reality to save her from herself. She has fought and bled and betrayed everything she believes in to keep Mara safe. For all that she questioned herself when Mara was young, she is a mother.

But first and foremost, Charlotte is a scientist.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments would make me happy.


End file.
